Has anyone here read any of these loony-tunes right wing books that seem to be selling a lot in the US now?

The thing that comforts me most is that a lot of my liberal friends, their parents, bosses, whatever, pick up these books to have easy conservative targets/know thy enemy/etc. Ann Coulter, in particular, is so outrageous that there's a lot of unintended entertainment value there -- although not enough for her to get any of my money.

Some people must still take this stuff at face value.

I think there is a key difference between Britsh and American ideas about freedom. Freedom is almost a dirty word for the british right. The british right don't want constitionaly gauranteed freedom they want control and social restriction, they want the 50s society, which is what the US want aswell but we refer to different 50s. This is why the British right want hanging and flogging and the US right want mcarthyism.

The last time I saw conservatism like this being sold, in the 80s, it was also the sort of thing you'd see as a coffee table book in households ranging from moderate to right-wing -- I was a kid then, but friends' parents would have them around. That was in New Hampshire, though, which is a strongly right-leaning state to begin with (and this was the Reagan era). I don't know how typical that was.

james i'm sorry you're here. wait, i mean i'm glad that you're here, but...you know what i mean. the u.s. is getting worse by the second.

your picture of the 'strange and twisted world' made me laugh out loud. thank you.

anyway, i live in san francisco, which as you probably know has a reputation for being the most liberal area of the country. if you listened to the radio here, though, you'd have no clue. you'd think you were in texas, in the heart of bush country. there are several 'talk show' stations that 24 hrs/day broadcast shows consisting of these incredibly obnoxious & absolutely reactionary men or women ranting about the liberals, the left, the commies, hollywood, etc. and how they're all undermining the country and committing treason and destroying our moral fiber and all this nonsense. then they take phone calls from even more far-out people (and that's the scary part; these are workaday people, the public, so you can't imagine that they are just being 'entertainment personalities' doing a shtick, like one might wish were the case) who agree with every word the host says and talk about how bush is one of the greatest presidents we've ever had (these are not prank callers; this is the real deal) and how the commie protestors should all be rounded up and placed in internment camps or executed or something.

one of the books you've mentioned, 'savage nation', is written by the host of one of these shows. this guy is just totally beyond the pale. one great thing i saw was at this wonderful bookstore in town. they had his book for sale, and underneath it was a card reading that for every copy someone buys, the store will donate the sum of the cover price of the book to the American Civil Liberties Union (which the author, michael savage, has a rabid hatred of, of course) this guy savage manages to get in all sorts of borderline racist attacks on every show, and of course gets in as many shots on gays and feminists as possible. he's pretty nuts.

i listen to these shows, and sometimes look at websites or literature by these kind of people as well, partly for the perverse entertainment it gives me, and partly to 'know the enemy'. but yeah, as horrifying as it is, these people do have a really huge audience in the country...including, as i mentioned, the bay area of california, which is supposed to be this liberal, no, radical stronghold...'left coast' and all.

it's very scary to me. just be glad you're only visiting! i guess i'd be freaked out even if i lived overseas. the people who are running the country now are absolutely terrifiying. bush, cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz, ashcroft...and the fact that they enjoy such huge support from the public, and have their minions in the media doing their bidding is just so alarming.

i was so glad to see in the news today that the bbc guy called out the u.s. media on their insanely slanted unquestioning uberpatriotic coverage of the war. fox and clear channel are totally fucked up. and i was alarmed to see that british media will be undergoing deregulation soon...don't let those clear channel fuckers in. they're totally evil. they own sooooo many radio stations here now, soooo many concert promotions, sooooo many billboards...people here in the states have taken to reading the guardian on a regular basis, because they realize that their own country's media does such a poor job of informing them.

it is hilarious and bizarre and sick that all of the books that you've mentioned have this persecution complex going...the titles alone are so laughable...and horrifying.

there are still anti-federalist camps lurking around, hiding in their survival bunkers and so forth. but it's such a fringe phenomenon. did you read 'them: adventures with extremists" by jon ronson? it kind of gives you the general idea. i think the fbi have those camps pretty much contained. in fact most of those militia groups have been infiltrated by fbi guys. they are perceived by the majority of americans as a fringe phenomenon, a bunch of racist gun nuts who think armageddon is just around the corner. so, to answer your question, no one takes them very seriously...hence they don't waste their breath labeling them 'unpatriotic'

although, scarily enough, signs seem to point to one of these types of groups as being responsible for the anthrax scare back in fall/winter '01.

isn't america just chock full of stark raving nutters? mind you, i'm not excluding myself from the category.

cheers, mr. dyke, cheers!!

I like this one best. The left's assault. That's rich.

What's funny is, if there were a real, actual fiscal and social conservative in the White House, we wouldn't be having this conversation. We instead have something called "neo-conservatives," a frankly bizarre school of thought that I've read has roots in Trotskyism. Big government, highly militaristic, not too pro on freedoms of speech, not too pro on taxes, either. Except I don't know how much of this is doctrine and how much is whim. And I sure as hell don't see a grand plan in any of it.

I want to read this woman's book and long for the days when conservatives at least stood for something, even if I hated them.

D'y'all think the rise of conservative daytime talk radio is directly proportional to the number of workers out there who don't work on a computer? I.e. have access to internet, CD player, file swappin', etc.?

< /classist>

Exaggerating the scare-tactics of ideologues on either side to make yr side seem more persecuted = DUD & DUDDER

I know, James, it was a cheap-shot joke, but it still made me laugh.

Fair point about them not signalling the downfall of civilisation, but I guess what worries me most is the thought that the likes of Wolfowitz, Perle and Rumsfeld have these books lined up on their shelves.

Don't forget, too, that AEI has Charles Murray and Dinesh "rational discrimination" D'Souza. [/puke]

This site is great. Political Research Associates put out good stuff, too.

Nabisco - no shit!?

As far as loony right-wingers go, you can't beat David Horowitz. Actually, you can beat him. With malice. Here's a stick.

*sigh*

BTW, I did read book 1 of the Left Behind series one summer because I saw my little cousin reading it and was curious. It was dumb. Of course, when I was her age I read : http://commerce.parable.com/ProdImage/0842361715.jpg

*if you consider paranoia fun.

Sadly, I think that there are not as many scary bible prophecy shows as there used to be.

as for Pat Robertson I can't look at his face for more than six seconds.

And the bitch of it all is CBN was bought out by the evil corporation Disney.

John Ankerberg was fun too. I especially enjoyed his programs on Satanic rock music. I wish I had those on tape.

Truly, Eugene lives a charmed life. I can only assume he exists because there are a lot of fascists in the US, I mean just plain ornery reactionaries who are prepared to reach for their pocketbooks and pay people to foam at the mouth on their behalf.

To remind myself that different kinds of Americans exist, I then spent at least twice as much time at these two sites devoted to the promotion of faggots and trendies:

http://www.ubu.com/sound/big_ego.html

http://cdm.sfai.edu/pel/index.html

what about his son? he really freaks me out.

Hstencil is OTM here. William Cooper was the Last Angry Man in the conspiracy circles. A lot of the Steamshovel Press and Iluiminet writers used to say that you haven't truly arrived until Cooper had accused you of being a CIA disinformation plant. Cooper was complete crackers (he *still* maintained that it was the limo driver that pulled the trigger on JFK), but "Pale Horse" has the best octopus diagrams.

Anyone know anything more about the unlawful death lawsuit that someone in his family filed? (Cooper was shot down by the FBI in front of his house in Arizona a couple years ago)